the Complexion Connexion

Finn, Hodding's sister, writes that Hodding Carter (IV), that's Finn's brother, will be interviewed on NPR this morning and it will air at 6:51 and again at 8:51 and, if we're lucky, again at 10:51 US EST (Eastern Standard Time).

Tune in to your local NPR station. Or listen on the Web (click the "Listen Now" link and hear Hodding chatting with NPR's Steve Inskeep for Morning Edition -- 6'47" ).

His new book, Off the Deep End, is about this 45-year old, ex-collegiate swimmer's bid to qualify for the 2008 Olympics.

Without having read it, I can say it sounds even more Plimpton-esque than his previous books: one about building a Viking knorr, assembling a crew of characters and retracing Leif Eriksson's sea-path from Greenland to the fabled "Vinland" (somewhere in Nova Scotia, I personally believe Vinland was actually Brooklyn -- there is simply no alternative explanation for Flatbush Avenue, Coney Island and Junior's Cheesecake); the other about retracing Lewis & Clark's river-path to the Northwest Passage (this has quite hilarious segments depicting Hodding, himself, and his side-kick, Preston, discovering mosquitoes and garbage on the Missouri River; Lewis & Clark will have had the one but not the other -- apart from deer poop).

There are a few others in the H Carter IV catalogue, one about the history of plumbing (a scatological indulgence) and another about the blight of the Florida Everglades (too far gone). While they too are about water or, specifically, about Hodding in water they are comparative placeholders in the auto-documentation of Hodding's life aquatic.

I anticipate this one about swimming is closer to the bone, even if the author is today still in Maine and not in Beijing with the rest of the U.S.A. Swim Team; perhaps because so.

Tune in today or later run the audio. Hodding is a funny, self-effacing very good read. Despite appearance, his scope of subjects is wider than himself and water, though he might not admit it.

Surfing around I found an interesting series of interview video clips of Tom Wolfe by Peter Robinson (Hoover Institution, sponsored by the National Review online).

Here, the author talks about his work and his interest in neuroscience.

There's chat of Wolfe's widely-discussed piece that ran in Forbes in the mid-1990's called, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," about which he admits to making the mistake of "conflating neuroscience with genetic theory ... they are very different things".

Well that's not why I started this post. The other Nick, Nick Mason, drummer for Pink Floyd has a book out which I just ordered from Amazon immediately after stumbling upon the Weidenfeld & Nicolson page somewhere out there.

I love Nick's minimal, tasteful drumming. He does the rare thing -- never an inappropriate stroke -- and disappears into the song. Suggests he'll write a good tale of this band which traveled far and saw it all.

Incidentally, there's a terrific segment in the Live at Pompey DVD which segues from Gilmour's solo tracking live at Abbey Road to the final mix and it is simply eye-opening the difference between the sound of a Gibson Les Paul in a room through a Marshall stack and how it sounds after Joe Boyd blends it into the final mix.

Thankfully or perhaps through stroke of brilliance or resistance to the impulse to delete all needless crap from my Personalized Homepage, I kept the Quote of the Day feed going. And am the better for it today...

I went to a book party for Joseph Heller in the Hamptons one
summer, expecting that Vonnegut would attend (my hostess had promised).
Alas, that jaundiced jester was a no-show, but William Gaddis was
there, coiled into a piece of patio furniture like a mantis molting
seersucker. I was introduced to Heller, who came across as congenial,
but when, moments later, I introduced myself to his wife, whom I didn't
recognize, I experienced the evening's first salvo of dagger-eyes.
Party highlights: meeting the legendary editor Faith Sale (whose
daughter, earlier in the season, had elected not to date me) and her
husband, the neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale. He and I were wearing
identical costumes of khaki and chambray enshrouded in blazer-blue,
though his nose was a deeper shade of red. I caught a ride back to
Manhattan with New Yorker cartoonist Victoria Roberts and her
boyfriend, a former Soviet Olympic water polo player who'd defected in
the 80s. Returning to Chelsea at that restless hour between the end of
the late show and last call, I visited the fortune teller on Eighth
Avenue. I don't recall exactly what she said, but I'm sure it had
nothing to do with reading stacks of freshman English compositions to
the point of transdermal dyslexia. So it goes indeed.

Erik[ed. note: There's no Wikipedia entry for transdermal dyslexia.]Erik E. Esckilsen is a writer & teacher living in Vermont. His latest book is The Outside Groove (Houghton Mifflin).

Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young. I’m sure there are plenty of
people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of
disillusionment. But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin
to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be.

Journalists, Presidents, famous chefs and media mavens gathered at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC last Tuesday (5 December) to feast and toast the passing of R.W. "Johnny" Apple who died in early October. We noted the obituary here, and celebrated a little the influential life and work of the great war correspondent, bureau chief and gastronomic vortex of Christendom.

“The Apple story is now a sub-genre of journalistic war stories... “In an Apple story, certain verbs are customary. Apple does not
enter a hotel in Beirut or a restaurant in London; he sweeps in. At the
end of a long dinner, Apple doesn’t talk or even pontificate; he holds
forth. In either case he is, as Tom Brokaw once put it, ‘in full Apple.’ ”

Charlie Rose was there too, and wore in playful respect a pink & white gingham spread-collar shirt like the one Apple wore for each appearance on Charlie Rose.

“I never got enough of him,” Mr. Rose said, adding that he did, however, wonder, “Does Johnny have just that one shirt?”

It seems China is the bigger story, grippingly told by ex Financial Times China Bureau-Chief, James Kynge. His book is China Shakes the World (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Houghton Mifflin). Kynge won the 30,000 (GBP) top prize, beating four other authors, each deserving for having written some well-researched and compelling stuff.

Don't forget, books are hard to write. Books this good represent years of brick-laying, soul-searching & sacrifice. (At the event I was seated at Charles Fishman's wife's table; she dryly and helpfully introduced herself: "I'm married to The Walmart Effect.") They don't just describe the world, they influence the Zeitgeist. And, for readers, they offer momentum...joy.

Finalists...

The Long Tail, Chris Anderson

Small Giants, Bo Burlingham

The Wal-Mart Effect, Charles Fishman

China Shakes the World, James Kynge

The Box, Marc Levinson

Whispers were for Anderson's The Long Tail and I was hopeful too, being a techie & having followed the story of the story as Chris, Wired Magazine's Editor-in-Chief (and ex-editor at The Economist), went from running his interesting article in Wired to thinking out loud on The Long Tail Blog and now to encoding it in parchment.

China moves a hair and it seems to envelope all thought. However, James Kynge seems to have written something really readable (I've only skimmed it so far) as well as informative based on decades of experience there and an intimate sense of the place. Well done, Jim! His suprise upon the dais, his slight breathlessness and collegial, self-effacing good humor -- 'thanks to the Finalists. We seem to have one thing in common, that we haven't read each others' books...' -- struck the right, the magnanimous note.

Indeed, the FT | GS Book Award was concieved with the idea of encouraging business authors to write better, write stuff the general readership could digest hungrily. Business books have sucked forever. So there is nothing more timely than throwing a few GBPs at the class to get literate inspiration, tough research and good story-telling to the fore. I applaude the motivations of the sponsors.

The winner last year, which was the first year for the FT | GS Book Award, was Tom Friedman (Pulitzer-Prize winning foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times) for his The World is Flat, which was not predominantly a business book, per se. Tom is substantive and readable -- though he's no Johnny Apple as a writer.

So, I attended the Awards dinner last night at the fine Mandarin Oriental Hotel: great venue, excellent food (even the wine was good). The Filet was a favorable surprise -- to use an old Wall Street expression -- aptly spiced with a teriaki-ginger sauce. And the proceedings on the whole were blessedly short & sweet.

Dr Lawrence H Summers

Larry Summers gave the keynote speech -- discretely fluffing his next book concept and warming this crowd for his coming dour vision of a flat earth. He was well rehearsed and exceedingly alarming about the future of the world.

Summers just got shit-canned last year as Harvard's President-ChangeAgent by a Faculty of Arts & Sciences who were decidedly unscientific in their approach of hoisting him on his petard of words -- something hypothetical, but frightening when taken out of its context, about women being lousy in math and the sciences. He was right -- as all Smartest-Guys-in-the-Room are -- but suffered because the faculty just didn't like him. Why? He's an arrogant asshole. Bad leader. A not good "man manager." The Harvard faculty, individually, just couldn't stand him, and they most certainly mustered every recollection of personal slight to generate the moral outrage necessary to tar & feather the guy. So, all tolled, a really good punch-up.

Last night, Summers' Fenway-sized ego filled the compact but comfortable banquet floor of the Mandarin Oriental at Columbus Circle in the AOL -- pardon -- Time Warner towers. The bits I recall about the speech include his introductory joke: "When I returned to Washington from academia, people asked me what's the difference between the two, and I said, 'Washington is soooo political...'"

His remarks were thoughtful and quieting. He said that globalization now is exciting but we have a scary development among the disenfranchised nations -- including the Islamic ones. It hasn't registererd much yet, but history may adjudge significant a meeting which recently took place in Cuba between the leaders of 67 countries. Castro was there, Chavez was there, and the president of India -- who couldn't find the space in his schedule to attend the concurrent proceedings at the UN -- was there. Summers mostly left it there (to a deathly silence in the hall), only to add that -- and hinting at the analogy of Tom Friedman's win last year -- in 1913 globalization was said to be ushering in an exciting new age of prosperity (1913: I was also thinking of the Wright Brothers and the clearing of Brown's Station in the flooding of the Ashokan & Schoharie Reserviours in the creation the New York Water System and their impact on optimism). Who, then, would have known that Progress and a labyrinthe of national alliances would unfold into "The Bloody Century"?

Chris' Lament

Prior to digging in to the filet, I spoke to Chris Anderson. I feared Lynn had said something like she was with 'her guest, Linus Torvalds,' so I went over to set Chris straight. He was enthusiastic & magnanimous; we talked mostly about open source for a few minutes and he wants very much to conveigh to R Stallman the problems of his lack of compromise, among other things.

On my left at the table I was flanked by Reuters' New York desk editor, Eddie Evans, who is a smart & dedicated English guy based here who took the time to explain some of Reuters' long history and its current structure (without losing me); and previously at cocktails I exchanged only a little more than small talk with Bill Saporito, Time Magazine's Editor-at-Large. Lynn kindly introduced me to Bob Miller, President of Hyperion (Disney | ABC).

This was not so much a financial as a publishing horse race, indicated by the number of women (tech must do better on the female scale, but I sadly see no catalyst) and the lack of very expensive suits of, say, the 151 new partners just announced at Goldman Sachs. Seems the Business Book of the Year Award is not such an attraction for the Wall Street warriors -- who do not read very much.

Lynn Goldberg (Goldberg McDuffie) has my warm & sincere appreciation for providing one of the most interesting evenings out in recent memory.